Special Tools

Two utilities that are part of Microsoft's suite of programming tools can be useful for publishing and maintaining design documentation: Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and Microsoft Visual Component Manager. Visual SourceSafe is designed primarily as a tool for controlling changes to source code during a development project, but the same tool can be used to manage the documents associated with the project.

I find Visual SourceSafe particularly useful for managing documentation when multiple designers are working on a project. The process of checking out documents before editing them eliminates the possibility of people overwriting one another's work, and it ensures that the most recent version of all documents is always available for review.

Visual Component Manager is a front end to the Microsoft Repository. It's bundled with the Enterprise edition of Microsoft Visual Studio. It's intended as a tool for administering documents and code components once they have been published, rather than for use during development. Visual Component Manager allows individual databases to be set up for each project, and I find it convenient for maintaining all the related documents in a single location.

If the project is developed using Visual Studio, the same project database can be used to administer all the code components as well, neatly keeping all the bits together. Unfortunately, Visual Component Manager is not integrated with Microsoft Access, although the Repository on which it is based is extensible and could theoretically be modified to do so.



Designing Relational Database Systems
Designing Relational Database Systems (Dv-Mps Designing)
ISBN: 073560634X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1999
Pages: 124

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